With the US midterm elections just a week away, Democratic Party leaders and candidates are waging the most right-wing campaign in the party's history. The essential content of this campaign is a pledge to continue the Bush administration's policies of militarism abroad and social reaction at home.
The Democrats are at pains to reassure America's financial elite that an end to Republican control over one or both houses of Congress will in no way impinge on their wealth or political influence.
According to the latest estimates, the two major parties are expected to spend some $2.6 billion, making this year's election the most expensive congressional contest ever. Vast sums of corporate money are flowing into the campaign coffers of leading figures in both parties, as US corporate and financial interests hedge their bets, making sure to buy influence on both sides of the aisle.
While seeking to profit from the popular hostility to the Bush administration over the war in Iraq, attacks on democratic rights and the accelerating transfer of social wealth from working people to the rich and the super-rich, the Democratic leadership is sending signals to the ruling elite that it has no intention of seriously challenging any of these policies. Rather, the party is being shifted even further to the right, in terms of both its platform and its candidates.
There is little to distinguish Democratic candidates from their Republican opponents. Thirty three of the Democratic challengers have won endorsements from either the Blue Dogs, a caucus of predominantly southern right-wing Democrats that frequently votes with the Republicans, or from the New Democrat Coalition, the congressional arm of the the pro-war, pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council, which emerged a decade ago as an opposition within the Democratic Party to what it derided as outmoded "liberalism..."